


A Dreadful Mistake

by The_Spiral_Staircase



Category: David Bowie (Musician)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-15
Updated: 2018-01-15
Packaged: 2019-03-05 08:07:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13383681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Spiral_Staircase/pseuds/The_Spiral_Staircase
Summary: Coco Schwab was more than a Personal Assistant to David Bowie: she shared his life.She is in excruciating pain after David’s passing and she tries to heal in various ways, sometimes they work, other times they don’t.  She can’t help holding on to her memories and makes a narration out of them. A narration to herself only, because as always, she won’t leak out a word.....Reach for your tissues, folks!





	A Dreadful Mistake

 

**A DREADFUL MISTAKE**

  


 

It’s some time after David Bowie died. The big tide of events came crashing and then slowly retired. Everything he wanted done has been done. His people are coping, the papers write, and the powerful machine he had developed around himself keeps rolling, well programmed and built to last. Only, the human core of it, a woman, suffered terrible damage, even more so, as she keeps it to herself. Because it’s Coco.

 

Today, she’s done something unusual: she’s taken a day off, but she’s working anyway, on healing herself. She needs to heal, she wants to, she must, because it’s a duty, he asked her to. “Let’s put it this way,” he said, “you’re not done with me, oh no. You’ll have to look after me in my most precious possessions. Take good care of yourself, you’re taking care of me…”. That… bastard had learned pretty well, if late in life and the hard way, how to make a good decision. So, she can’t wither, she can’t crash into an empty life, she can’t die.

But now she can lie on her bed and let her mind wander towards the past, weaving and mending, almost like a soul temporarily free of her aching body.

She drifts out of dreams, to dream-like words:

 

Modern love?

There's no such thing.

Love is ancient and unfathomable.

It’s the magic fog and the deep darkness, from which you were drawn.

Love in its God-child incarnation trips you over and laughs.

Or as the eternal Mistress, love makes you humble.

You’re the stool she will grace of her naked foot, moonlight reflecting on her jade-lacquered toes.

 

 

She moves in the bed, slowly waking up, but she just stays there, remembering, remembering. She tells herself about who she is, about who she used to be. That’s called picking up the pieces.

 

 

“In my early life, my previous life, I was born a girl, and the universe was swarming above me, my qualities springing or else barely revealing, like streaks of gold sparkling through clay and stone. A girl I was, but I held this suspicion I was actually a galaxy, as perceptions softly rotated all around me, thickening and thinning here and there, letting colours and signals pierce through at times. Also, I would get a sudden taste in my mouth, in phantom waves, sweet and primal as mother's milk, or the holy water of tears shed while doting on a sleeping loved one.

Meanwhile, I also went through the customary phases, I guess. I was my mother and my father's child and my story stemmed from theirs, which were quite unordinary and in different ways both devoted to revelation. My father parsed unbearable scenes of reality through his photographer’s lens and held them out for the world to see, while my mother helped her patients give birth to themselves and to their awkward truths on her studio couch. As a girl, I used to wonder if I had received any superpowers, and when would I discover a personal goal to use them for. This says, I was looking for revelations myself.

I had features of my own, mostly hidden under a surface, and I wouldn’t care for showing much. Rather, my interest lay in what was shown to me as my parents took me around the world. I also loved catching reality and personalities by surprise and framing their secrets, and I found that a nondescript appearance helped a lot in that.

So, all of this and other made my life as I grew up and became a young woman: I wanted to fend for myself and go on travelling the world my own way.”

 

(As for the current ad in today's paper, regarding a secretary position, hereattached please find my CV :

………………….

girl, 25

American

recently graduated

speaks 4 languages fluently

travelling experience

drives her own car

Music? Fashion?

Interested in photography

 

Busy office job? Fine.)

 

I joined a circus, or was that a modern fairy-tale world, a Wonderland? More so, probably. Beware of both Queens, then, I thought as I looked around, nursing my drink at the first party. There they are, what an odd couple, the raving, raging Red and the soft-spoken, milky White one...

Careful, Alice, don’t stare too long.

Still, I was very much absorbed in myself, my personality and plans, I took in the whole picture my way, which meant secret, deep soul sedition. In the meantime, I did my thing in that frilly, drug-taking, mutually shagging universe. I wasn't actually paying very much attention to whatever crossed all of those freaks' minds. I concentrated on my job and saw that I did it thoroughly. I didn't really want to hang around, but I liked the idea of standing out for my qualities, as long as I was there. Soon I grew stronger and more expert in my duties. A good minder, yes, but who minds the minder? I found myself wondering.

The whole shebang moved to America, and the page was turned to another fairy-tale, as the events scooped me up like a wild tornado wind, landing me in the middle of unprecedented situations. And how I wished I had also landed straight on the Wicked Witch, instead of having to deal with her loud mouth!

Dorothy, watch your next steps….

I began to look at David, my employer, as a form of life to protect, a unique specimen. Others around him? I observed them unemotionally, without animosity, just rating their potential: positive? Negative? Useless? I could see power stream from the hands of those who had it, I could sense a fall from grace before it would manifest, bad luck before it would strike those who still deemed themselves sunkissed. So my hands would naturally go for their weakening roots, it just had to be done. Otherwise, how could we face bigger dangers to come? With his manager, David was like a magic dancer at the hands of a ruthless puppet master and it would take time before he could learn to dance away free. Angela, his wife, had done a lot, but was losing touch. She still firmly believed she would get something like ‘an equal share’, of fame, love, importance, recognition, while all signs I could observe showed a different roadmap. In time, she would suss something was off and her soul became hungrier and hungrier. Someone would have laughed at her, up on the Olympus. Rather, it felt like something to cry for. However, she became a type of danger. David pushed her away and kept me close, where he could always pull my roots, just in case.

So things went their own way, not the way I had planned, and not the way the others had planned.

No-one could be my confidante, so I hid my starry eyes and quietly asked myself: Have you ever felt a powerful, wonderful poison pump through your veins, knowing it's... bad for you, but hang on, sure there must be an antidote somewhere, down at the bottom of your all-purpose girl handbag, somewhere in the back of your super-intelligent wonder girl brain?

I did give myself good advice, but couldn’t take it.

So, one of those working days I lost my treasured indipendence, my cold blood, my photographer’s eye and I stepped right into the picture.

And then, and then….

We were young, David and I, so many years ago, when I would know and treasure the touch of his white demon fingers, as they parted the hair on my brow, like a bride's veil. I knew the catch in his breath, I knew his letting go. I held him in my arms and I thought of myself as a dragon, as a honeybee, as the golden scarab pressed to his lips by the embalmer’s bandages.

People might think I basked in the delusion I could be a Wally Simpson to his Edward, but no. Not me. Not him. He wasn't the kind to ever renounce his destiny. Quite the opposite: a proper king he was, and he would one day place a proper queen by his side, implement his life and decorate his kingdom with her and all her queenly wonders.

People then said I was a substitute mother for him. No shame in that, and nobody’s business either. Some days he even needed a cocoon, a womb. Mother's milk. Partly, he needed time to grow up, and then he did.

Over time he became another man, or better, he became a man, and I stood by him. I was his sphinx, the eternal guarding presence by his side, and I could and would take many forms, all to one purpose, though.

Of course anyone can say he did pay me. More precisely, we could say that money came along, yes, and finally, in my single case he did what he could to make up for what life does in time to each and everyone of us, a wreckage. Well, not even his rose diamonds could reverse destiny, but yes, we could sometimes look in the sparkles and see memories of our young selves, and that was sweet.

The kind of reward I got from the beginning was of a peculiar kind, in currency that only I could accept and treasure, it was my life meaning. The clicking of a masterful, age-old, otherworldly mechanism, sealing my soul to his, and no-one could do a thing about it. Nobody.

 

Now. I scratch my wrists raw in bed at night, and first thing in the morning, only more carefully, unless the scratches open up and bleed again, and that just for good company. Just to feel.

Recently I had a really bad, desperate idea, the ugly kind you hide from others. I bought a pack of cigarettes, his old brand, I lit one and let the smoke waft in the air, so it was almost like he was in the house and he had just left the cigarette there in the ashtray, only to go to another room.

Dreadful mistake, that.

It was a terrible thing to do and I won't do it again.”

 

 

Coco has spent her day off picking up her memories and sawing them together again like spilled pearls. She’s feeling a bit better. The following day, she gets up very early and puts on her armour, goes to work, does what she’s doing these days. She’s coping, let the papers write.

There’s something she wants to start with: she’s picked up every personal object David left here and there in the office and she’s put everything away nicely in a pair of boxes to bring back to the apartment, David and Iman’s home. Coco wants to go and get over with it, leave the boxes at the desk downstairs: today Iman’s away, visiting her daughter who’s temporarily staying at some dear friends’.

But when she’s there, Coco changes her mind and tells the man at the desk she’ll bring the boxes up herself. Her voice has both the ring of authority and the matter-of-factness of a person doing what was an everyday chore just some time ago. The man watches her walk towards the lift with a sad smile fading from his face.

Coco opens the door with her own key, she knows she’s doing herself harm, but she goes ahead anyway.

Here’s the familiar scent wrapping her up, embracing her… She closes her eyes, but David’s not there, and the house is empty. No-one’s there yet, only the morning sun, in every room facing east. Not that Coco is wandering around: she’s put her boxes down in the entrance, also because she’s feeling dizzy. She stops to catch her breath and decides to get a glass of water in the kitchen. She feels faint, a bad, bad idea coming up here…

Walking towards the kitchen, she passes by the master bedroom. The door’s open and she can’t help looking in. Oh God, the bed’s undone and… strewn with David’s clothes, many of them. Coco gasps in anguish: she can see Iman’s clearly been clutching those clothes, crying into them.

Coco puts her hand on her mouth and slides down to the floor. She squeezes her eyes shut crying silently, her throat aches so much. Those clothes! They can’t be put away in boxes…

The ravaged linen nearly shine, as clean as a white flower and David’s cologne is in the air, but this is the stench of grief. When you’re coping for everyone else, but not for yourself, because your pain is not healed, only rotting inside, and you’re not coping at all, because you can’t. So you write his name on the skin of your wrist with a ballpoint pen like a fourteen-year-old and keep it under your sleeve all day. And anyone making a heedless gesture could discover the evidence that you are not coping, you are not getting over it, that you miss him so.

 

I was not supposed to see this… thinks Coco shaking her head, and her grief doubles, because she’s not the only one making dreadful mistakes.

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry, sorry, sorry: this is about a moment of complete ANGST.  
> It is about grief and not healing (yet).  
> First of all it is for the people mentioned in the story, although of course I don’t know them, I just love them.  
> I also totally fictionalized real people into characters and I apologize for any misplaced detail which might offend them. A wink to Angie: calling her a raging Red Queen and a Wicked Witch is a bit unfair, but it was functional to my personal fairy tale.  
> This is the first story I post here, although it was written quite a while ago. It goes out to all the writers of sweet, beautiful fanfiction who ever gifted me with emotion! I joined here and left comments in the past as mary_pickford, my nickname from a former silent-movie forum, but from now on I'd like to use my writing nickname, also from an old cinema classic, that is  
> The Spiral Staircase.


End file.
